Yes and a bit confusing. There's no legend of what the colours exactly mean and although it may seem obvious, there's both blue and red eVisa and the explanation is tucked away. Also the difference between yellow and red isn't obvious. Websites shouldn't have a learning curve.
My initial thought was: this is kinda nice, now I don't have to wait so long for my stuff to be posted, and I was wondering if the queue became longer and you've implemented pressure or something and that that's what was causing it.
But now that you mention it, yeah, the side effect of this is that things won't be displayed long enough and this touches on what I think is the innate issue with a queue. It's actually separate from comments, if people have time to view something they have time to comment as well, or maybe you're talking about time for a longer discussion to form but I mean something else. If everyone gets a bonus for queueing stuff then things get displayed equally and not based on innate value. We have all these sliders but Reddit doesn't need this because they use a good algorithm where new posts are briefly displayed high on the page so there's time for people to see and upvote, and that lets it slowly rise. Everything happens in real time. And posts in small subs receive extra visibility to the few users who are subscribed to it. So small and big subs have fair competition between them. Reddit doesn't need a queue because everything is constantly moving up and down, both by votes and time passage, and ageing counts only in comparison with the age of other posts, not in absolute time, so if everyone stops posting and voting, the frontpage freezes. They really tweaked the algorithm, it's like a secret formula that makes it work regardless of the scale, everything gets fair visibility.
Okay, I get the issue, you were doing that but nobody voted so this website looked dead. But at the same time, it wasn't, the frontpage was constantly in motion. Some Reddit subs hide the score for the first x hours after posting, that'd be another solution. If you promise to feature new posts it's at the cost of other posts being dragged down, and that inflates the value of upvotes, that's the heart of the issue imo. Instead things should be featured based on a climb to the top and if something doesn't climb, it doesn't. New posts could still hover around spot 5-6 or something while the highest spots are reserved for new things that are actually upvoted. I think that's a really healthy frontpage.
I don't think we really need the sliders. They are just extra and optional. I think we are getting a pretty good mix from the slider's default position. Reddit has these same kinds of sliders (or their equivalent) but they are being controlled by the admins exclusively. The only reason for the queue isn't really to make up for a deficit in the algorithm but really to make up for one or two days when people wouldn't post at all. It's more of a problem similar to the fractional reserve problem. Because reddit has more population they don't have to worry about the site getting zero posts over 2 days ever. If even a post or two comes out of the queue a day then it is doing its job of making sure it's never zero. I upped the speed because it felt slow for a bit and because some indicated they wanted it to go faster so I saw some alignment there.
What we need to do is figure out how to generate more discussion. We now have posts but not a lot of comments. I think the key is discussion topics. We need a few clever ones. The ones dropped by the guy copying from reddit, while an interesting idea, and I assume actually well intentioned, didn't generate that much discussion. I find what gets a conversation going here or many other sites that have what I'll call natural consensus is not the same as what generates discussion on reddit. The tone is different. That's why I thought to check reddit. When it sounds like the question was run past a lawyer to vet every corner of a simple question you know it's reddit. People do it to survive Reddit's knee jerk criticism.
So I think discussion posts like that are needed but it requires more creativity and thought than copying off reddit. The trick would be to divide the community over something that's innocent enough. Not for the sake of dividing the community but so we don't have a boring post that's just everyone agreeing.
Also: In terms of tech on my end to help increase this I need to implement the unseen comments suggestion you made. It's in the list. I just need to get around to it. Ideally we could even get something like: 15 comments (5 new), on the post-outers.
I think I am going to slow the queue a bit until we see some more discussion. As long as we always have one in the top 5 newer than 5 hours I'm happy with the post rate. But if we have more posts than we can even talk about then we don't have a community, we have a link dump.
It's easy to see what has generated discussion in the past by upping that comment slider. Sometimes it's really simple questions or discussing what's happening on another site.
TL;DR: I think the next focus should be promoting discussion. Also these threads that get discussion are more shareable to other sites so we can build the population needed to have consistent discussion and not need post banking.
I don't like thinking about discussion as something to generate as a goalpost. Feels artificial. I know you're just trying to make the website look healthy. I think this is the inherent problem with using a link aggregator for discussion. The discussions are competing with links being dumped. Discussions kinda worked well on flat style forums. It was such an exciting thing when those were high traffic. Discussions played out in real time instead of being readily laid out and optimized through votes at the moment you see them. You see them when they have already taken place, because those are the ones that the algorithm promotes, and you can still add a comment anywhere in the tree but it won't have an impact in steering the discussion, also the discussion will disappear to make place for new posts in a day or two. Yuck. Link aggregators are good for content discovery.
But okay, this is what people like and it'd be nice to make discussions work here. Still, let people discuss things if they really want to, not for the sake of it. It's normal for only 1% of the users to partake in discussion. If the site becomes more popular, discussions will grow organically. I'm afraid it's the chicken and egg problem again. But like, there's a reason why Reddit used bots in the beginning. They had a big campaign and a launch party so to speak.
I'm starting to see why you added comment count as part of the formula now. To promote a discussion to go on. Yeah maybe this works and it simply requires more activity before the effects can be seen.
Also I want to add I will give credit where it's due, the frontpage does look healthier now than before queue got introduced.
I don't want people to have in authentic discussions. Then we have Reddit, or Instagram, or LinkedIn. But I think discussion topics that bring up discussion hits everything people want. I think people want to discuss things. They don't want to look at a link dump. It does make the site look healthier as a byproduct. I think people genuinely have a more fun time.
But I think topics that do that have to be authentic and have real thought to them. That's why the user who copied reddit /r/AskReddit topics had everything he posted fall flat. I guess there is a Terry Davis-ism here. To get something back from it you have to put something in that took real work, that's genuinely good. Of course in Terry's case that was him talking to his random number generator (really a pioneer in using an LLM). That guy was vibe coding before any of us. Just his random text generator was really shit that he proompted with jokes was really shit.
I just think we should keep our eye out for meaningful discussions. Nothing in-authentic about that. It will make things more fun. Part of the appeal is that a more live site is more fun and not just an improvement on appearance. The appearance itself is just a means to an end of making things more fun, by making it possible to get more people.
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That's a pretty cool concept. The site is way too fancy vs useful though. To find a passport they give you the grocery store item lookup interface.
Yes and a bit confusing. There's no legend of what the colours exactly mean and although it may seem obvious, there's both blue and red eVisa and the explanation is tucked away. Also the difference between yellow and red isn't obvious. Websites shouldn't have a learning curve.
Queue is being processed fast now.
Is it too fast? I could halve the rate. It seems like there isn't enough time for people to comment on anything.
My initial thought was: this is kinda nice, now I don't have to wait so long for my stuff to be posted, and I was wondering if the queue became longer and you've implemented pressure or something and that that's what was causing it.
But now that you mention it, yeah, the side effect of this is that things won't be displayed long enough and this touches on what I think is the innate issue with a queue. It's actually separate from comments, if people have time to view something they have time to comment as well, or maybe you're talking about time for a longer discussion to form but I mean something else. If everyone gets a bonus for queueing stuff then things get displayed equally and not based on innate value. We have all these sliders but Reddit doesn't need this because they use a good algorithm where new posts are briefly displayed high on the page so there's time for people to see and upvote, and that lets it slowly rise. Everything happens in real time. And posts in small subs receive extra visibility to the few users who are subscribed to it. So small and big subs have fair competition between them. Reddit doesn't need a queue because everything is constantly moving up and down, both by votes and time passage, and ageing counts only in comparison with the age of other posts, not in absolute time, so if everyone stops posting and voting, the frontpage freezes. They really tweaked the algorithm, it's like a secret formula that makes it work regardless of the scale, everything gets fair visibility.
Okay, I get the issue, you were doing that but nobody voted so this website looked dead. But at the same time, it wasn't, the frontpage was constantly in motion. Some Reddit subs hide the score for the first x hours after posting, that'd be another solution. If you promise to feature new posts it's at the cost of other posts being dragged down, and that inflates the value of upvotes, that's the heart of the issue imo. Instead things should be featured based on a climb to the top and if something doesn't climb, it doesn't. New posts could still hover around spot 5-6 or something while the highest spots are reserved for new things that are actually upvoted. I think that's a really healthy frontpage.
I don't think we really need the sliders. They are just extra and optional. I think we are getting a pretty good mix from the slider's default position. Reddit has these same kinds of sliders (or their equivalent) but they are being controlled by the admins exclusively. The only reason for the queue isn't really to make up for a deficit in the algorithm but really to make up for one or two days when people wouldn't post at all. It's more of a problem similar to the fractional reserve problem. Because reddit has more population they don't have to worry about the site getting zero posts over 2 days ever. If even a post or two comes out of the queue a day then it is doing its job of making sure it's never zero. I upped the speed because it felt slow for a bit and because some indicated they wanted it to go faster so I saw some alignment there.
What we need to do is figure out how to generate more discussion. We now have posts but not a lot of comments. I think the key is discussion topics. We need a few clever ones. The ones dropped by the guy copying from reddit, while an interesting idea, and I assume actually well intentioned, didn't generate that much discussion. I find what gets a conversation going here or many other sites that have what I'll call natural consensus is not the same as what generates discussion on reddit. The tone is different. That's why I thought to check reddit. When it sounds like the question was run past a lawyer to vet every corner of a simple question you know it's reddit. People do it to survive Reddit's knee jerk criticism.
So I think discussion posts like that are needed but it requires more creativity and thought than copying off reddit. The trick would be to divide the community over something that's innocent enough. Not for the sake of dividing the community but so we don't have a boring post that's just everyone agreeing.
Also: In terms of tech on my end to help increase this I need to implement the unseen comments suggestion you made. It's in the list. I just need to get around to it. Ideally we could even get something like: 15 comments (5 new), on the post-outers.
I think I am going to slow the queue a bit until we see some more discussion. As long as we always have one in the top 5 newer than 5 hours I'm happy with the post rate. But if we have more posts than we can even talk about then we don't have a community, we have a link dump.
It's easy to see what has generated discussion in the past by upping that comment slider. Sometimes it's really simple questions or discussing what's happening on another site.
TL;DR: I think the next focus should be promoting discussion. Also these threads that get discussion are more shareable to other sites so we can build the population needed to have consistent discussion and not need post banking.
I don't like thinking about discussion as something to generate as a goalpost. Feels artificial. I know you're just trying to make the website look healthy. I think this is the inherent problem with using a link aggregator for discussion. The discussions are competing with links being dumped. Discussions kinda worked well on flat style forums. It was such an exciting thing when those were high traffic. Discussions played out in real time instead of being readily laid out and optimized through votes at the moment you see them. You see them when they have already taken place, because those are the ones that the algorithm promotes, and you can still add a comment anywhere in the tree but it won't have an impact in steering the discussion, also the discussion will disappear to make place for new posts in a day or two. Yuck. Link aggregators are good for content discovery.
But okay, this is what people like and it'd be nice to make discussions work here. Still, let people discuss things if they really want to, not for the sake of it. It's normal for only 1% of the users to partake in discussion. If the site becomes more popular, discussions will grow organically. I'm afraid it's the chicken and egg problem again. But like, there's a reason why Reddit used bots in the beginning. They had a big campaign and a launch party so to speak.
I'm starting to see why you added comment count as part of the formula now. To promote a discussion to go on. Yeah maybe this works and it simply requires more activity before the effects can be seen.
Also I want to add I will give credit where it's due, the frontpage does look healthier now than before queue got introduced.
I don't want people to have in authentic discussions. Then we have Reddit, or Instagram, or LinkedIn. But I think discussion topics that bring up discussion hits everything people want. I think people want to discuss things. They don't want to look at a link dump. It does make the site look healthier as a byproduct. I think people genuinely have a more fun time.
But I think topics that do that have to be authentic and have real thought to them. That's why the user who copied reddit /r/AskReddit topics had everything he posted fall flat. I guess there is a Terry Davis-ism here. To get something back from it you have to put something in that took real work, that's genuinely good. Of course in Terry's case that was him talking to his random number generator (really a pioneer in using an LLM). That guy was vibe coding before any of us. Just his random text generator was really shit that he proompted with jokes was really shit.
I just think we should keep our eye out for meaningful discussions. Nothing in-authentic about that. It will make things more fun. Part of the appeal is that a more live site is more fun and not just an improvement on appearance. The appearance itself is just a means to an end of making things more fun, by making it possible to get more people.